NVIDIA's "GeForce Experience" application isn't so much an "experience" as it is a software application designed to optimize video game settings for a wide variety of PC setups. It's also a kind of Steam for drivers, if you will, in that it automatically maintains an updated list of drivers for your PC's various parts, only requiring the user to click the install button. In a recent demo with NVIDIA, we saw Borderlands 2 go from good looking (standard out of box settings) to significantly snappier (optimized), and Modern Warfare 3 transform from a visual mess to a ... well, it looked a lot better. You'll forgive us for not being wowed by a two-year-old game's aging visuals. Good news is you can see for yourself by applying to the limited beta -- 10,000 lucky folks will be granted entry ahead of the early January public launch (the beta application process appears to be offline thus far, but we'll let you know when it's live).

The application costs nothing and works with around 30 games thus far (pre-loaded in the beta as "profiles") -- NVIDIA sees the software not as a tool for direct monetization, but as a means to grow the accessibility of PC gaming. Of course, growing the world of PC gaming helps NVIDIA just as much as the next guy, if not more; the company says the GeForce Experience's algorithms aren't set with only NVIDIA GPUs in mind (or given preference), but we're a bit wary of that assertion without our own rigorous hands-on. Thankfully, we'll be able to provide just that very soon, as the application just entered closed beta. NVIDIA's hoping to have it finished and live by early January, "around CES," if you'd rather just wait for the final build.

Update: The sign-up page is live, as is a lengthy rundown of the service from NVIDIA itself. There's even a video showing you how the whole thing works, which we've dropped below.